Michael E > Michael's Quotes

“She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Moments spill through hands idling away at nothing To puddle in years”
― Hugh Howey, The Plagiarist

“God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“There’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in this world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people…”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“Humanity lives in its fiction.”
― Blaise Cendrars

“I make her leave on her stockings and high heels. I am a freak. I cannot bear the human being in present state, I must be fooled. the psychiatrists must have a word for it, and I have a word for the psychiatrists.”
― Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
― Norman Mailer

“The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly - by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“Hot nights filled with summer thunder. Heat lightning far and thin and the midnight sky becrazed and mended back again. Suttree moved down to the gravelbar on the river and spread his blanket there under the gauzy starwash and lay naked with his back pressed to the wheeling earth. The river chattered and sucked past at his elbow. He'd lie awake long after the last dull shapes in the coals of the cookfire died and he'd go naked into the cool and velvet waters and submerge like an otter and come up and blow, the stones smooth as marbles under his cupped toes and the dark water reeling past his eyes. He'd lie on his back in the shallows and on these nights he'd see stars come adrift and rifle hot and dying across the face of the firmament. The enormity of the universe filled him with a strange sweet woe.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.”
― James Salter, Light Years

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“I was in love with everything- I wanted to look with love at the angry people so that their eyes would be forced to respond; and I wanted to bring gifts to the envious and tell them that I am worthless.”
― Egon Schiele

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe that is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside of the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and business men who wither with boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly through the Persona.”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“To read without joy is stupid.”
― John Williams

“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”
― James Salter, All That Is

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables, and Lesser-Known Writings

“No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.”
― James Joyce, Two Essays: A Forgotten Aspect of the University Question and The Day of the Rabblement